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Today's Pathway: I Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Over the past few verses Paul has been showing the Corinthians that the Holy Spirit is necessary to understand the mind of God. Lest there still be some questions, Paul makes the profound statement that the unsaved (natural) man can not understand spiritual things. Jack Arnold raised the following scenarios:

"Have you ever been in a witnessing situation and said to yourself, 'Why doesn’t this person understand the truth? It is so obvious he needs Christ. Why doesn’t he get it?' Or have you ever turned on your TV to a news broadcast and heard about murder, violence, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, adultery, premarital sex and a hundred other crimes or vices and out of frustration you said, 'What’s wrong with this world? Don’t they see these things are destroying our society? Don’t they understand the first thing about morality?' I Corinthians 2:14-16 tells us why the world does not understand and why we Christians get frustrated with the world and its wisdom. The wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world are on two different wavelengths, two different channels, two different foundations and the two shall never meet"

So, if spiritual issues can only be understood through the work of the Holy Spirit, and unsaved people don't have the Holy Spirit indwelling them, we see that they do not have the necessary "tool" for understanding. Thus, because they don't understand, they consider Biblical truth to be foolishness, because it doesn't go along with their worldly mindset. Sometimes believers spend much time and energy trying to convince the lost to come to Biblical positions on morality and politics, yet spend almost no time sharing the Gospel with them. Without the Gospel, all the other discussions are destined to be fruitless. We may say to an unsaved person, "The Bible says..." about a particular issue of the day, but since that person doesn't have the Holy Spirit, the fact that the Bible says something really doesn't matter to him. And even if he does pay lip service to the Scriptures, he doesn't understand them, because he can't. Thus, the great need is to tell people about how they need to be saved, and how Christ died, and rose again to pay the price for their redemption.

Some might ask, "If people can't grasp the Scriptures without the Holy Spirit, and unsaved people don't have the Holy Spirit, how can they ever understand that they need to be born again?" Even though the Spirit does not, and can not, indwell the lost, He still is at work trying to bring them to salvation. Jesus taught His disciples in John 16:8-11 about this. He said that when the Holy Spirit came,

"He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged."

In all your debates with the lost, how much time have you spent dealing with their real issue: salvation?